We are compelled, from the preceding considerations, to acknowledge not merely that criminal abortion is of alarming frequency among us, but that its frequency is rapidly increasing; this having been made apparent by each link in the chain of evidence that has been presented. Every effort that might possibly check this flood of guilt will, if delayed, have so much the more to accomplish. The crime is fast becoming, if it has not already become, an established custom, less honored in the breach than in the observance.

What are the causes of this general turpitude?

They also may be classified—

I.—The low morale of the community as regards the guilt of the crime.
II.—The ease with which its character, in individual cases, may be concealed.
III.—The unwillingness of its victims to give testimony that would also criminate themselves.
IV.—The possibility of their inducing abortion upon themselves without aid.
V.—The ease with which the laws, as at present standing, may be evaded.
VI.—The lack or inefficacy of judicial preventives; such as statutes for registration, and those against concealment of birth and secret burials.
VII.—The prevalent ignorance of the true principles of its jurisprudence in both government officials and medical witnesses.
VIII.—Social extravagance and dissipation.
IX.—The doctrines of political economists.
X.—The fear of child-bed.

That public opinion should at present attach so little importance to the value of fœtal life, has already been shown to be owing in great measure to ignorance respecting its actual existence in the earlier months of pregnancy. Two other, and no less general, physiological errors prevail, extensively inculcated by popular authors and lecturers for their own sinister purposes.

One of these is the doctrine that it is detrimental to a woman’s health to bear children beyond a certain number, or oftener than at certain stated periods, and that any number of abortions are not merely excusable, as preventives, but advisable; it being entirely forgotten that the frequency of connection may be kept within bounds, and the times of its occurrence regulated, by those who are not willing to hazard its consequences; that if women will, to escape trouble or for fashion’s sake, forego the duty and privilege of nursing, a law entailed upon them by nature, and seldom neglected without disastrous results to their own constitutions, they must expect more frequent impregnation; that the habit of aborting is generally attended with the habit of more readily conceiving; and that abortions, accidental, and still more if induced, are generally attended by the loss of subsequent health, if not of life.

This error is one which would justify abortion as necessary for the mother’s own good; a selfish plea. The other is based on a more generous motive. It is that the fewer one’s children, the more healthy they are likely to be, and the more worth to society. It is, however, equally fallacious with the first, and is without foundation in fact. The Spartans and Romans, so confidently appealed to, gave birth probably to as many weakly children as do our own women; that they destroyed many for this reason in infancy, is notorious. The brawny Highlanders are not the only offspring of their parents; the others cannot endure the national processes of hardening by exposure and diet, and so die young from natural causes. But were this theory true even so far as it goes, the world, our own country, could ill spare its frailer children, who oftenest, perhaps, represent its intellect and its genius.

In asserting that the doctrines of the leading political economists for the last half century are accountable for much of the prevalence and increase of the crime, ignorant or careless as these writers all seem of the dire means that would be resorted to for the attainment of their ends, I have in no way exaggerated. Malthus remarks in his well-known Essay on Population, that “in the average state of a well-peopled territory, there cannot well be a worse sign than a large proportion of births, nor can there well be a better sign than a small proportion;”[83] and he endorses the assertion of Hume, subsequently proved false by Sadler,[84] that the permission of child-murder, by removing the fear of too numerous a family in case of marriage, tends to encourage this step, and thereby the increase of population; “the powerful yearnings of nature preventing parents from resorting to so cruel an expedient, except in extreme cases.”[85]

Sismondi[86] and a host of others might also be quoted, but a few extracts from a later writer, standard in this country at present, and taught in our universities, till very lately in that at Cambridge, for instance, will suffice.